@Best Of - Algeria has the military power necessary to defeating Ansar Dine, as well as the motivation (uber-secular militarist government, also fearful of territorial destabilization due to the Tuareg factor).

ETA - Short of that though, the ECOWAS countries together, with some monetary and equipment backing from the West, could take them on.

Another small update from the BBC: From Our Own Correspondent article. A comparison with the Timbuktu of three years ago and phone calls with people still there. Timbuktu is half empty and the Islamists are still looting (oh, sorry, unblaspheming or whatever) ancient shrines.

Preparations for driving the Islamists out are continuing. I think it needs to be headed by Muslims because Ansar Dine and co are absolutely going to hide in and shoot from (sorry, defend) mosques and other holy places. All the same, they'll have little cover from drone strikes when they're not using fellow Muslims and religious buildings as shields.

In Kidal, youth and women tired of Ansar al-Dinís social restrictions gathered to display their opposition to the movement with slogans, public smoking in defiance of the ban on tobacco use, and stone-throwing by the women, who removed their Islamist-decreed veils after Ansar al-Din elements retreated in damaged vehicles

Last thing I heard from the MNLA was that they were promising to retake Gao shortly after losing it. According to Wikipedia they still control most of the towns though they lost the most significant ones. It's possible that they could take down Ansar Dine and co but fear that they'll be attacked by ECOWAS afterwards while they're weak. Alternatively maybe they can't persuade their fighters to stop defending the towns they come from to retake the big places. But their inaction is making them seem very irrelevant.

This is a very interesting article that summarizes the situation in Mali. Apparently the Islamists were welcomed by locals because the Tuareg MNLA had been brutalizing people. Now residents of the towns controlled by the Islamists just want the fighting to stop.

From the article: "...Indeed, success in Gao for the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJWA) - an organization involved in bombings, smuggling and kidnappings in Algeria - and Ansar al-Dine, founded by the Tuareg Islamist and former MNLA commander Iyad Ag Ghali, did not just come militarily. It also came through through the fact that the Islamists accurately read street protests over the murder of a local official and their escalation against the MNLA occupation and Tuareg separatism in general. France24 reports that MUJWA and Ansar al-Dine quickly took up places alongside the demonstrators A spokesman for Ansar al-Dine claims that the Islamists, who do count Tuaregs among their numbers, "only" moved against the MNLA in order to prevent them from further brutalizing the city's residents..."

Later in the same article: "...But as the shock of its assault wore out over Mali's geographic space and ethnic divisions, the Tuareg's position deteriorated (they account for no more than a fifth of Mali's total population, and many have since moved to the cities). The MNLA has been hurting for manpower and finances. Additionally, the several-thousand strong MNLA did not represent all Tuaregs. Splits within the movement among participating Tuareg tribes, such as the Kel Adagh, had weakened the separatists before the falling out with Ansar al-Dine occurred in Timbuktu..."

So, as disgusting as the recent actions by the Islamists may be, there appear to be logical reasons why they managed to take over.

I'd like to know how powerful and relevant the MNLA still are (opinion seems to be 'not very' to both those). The Tuareg Rebellion Wikipedia page still reckons they control most towns but not the three main ones (Gao, Kidal and Timbuktu). I wonder how true that is - maybe it is if those are Tuareg-majority places and very self-sufficient.

Well I sort of hope that at least the UN has a benevolent motive - namely, to stop Northern Mali from becoming a graveyard or receding into a middle age theocracy. An AU intervention with UN support might be the only way to stop the Islamists from ruining the country, though whether the AU can actually do anything in Mali is very much in doubt, especially when you look at previous and current AU operations like the one in Somalia. (To be fair, though, there has been some progress in Somalia recently.)

Honestly, the whole problem with this taking so long seems to be Bamako itself. Considering they're barely holding themselves together, I'm almost inclined that the powers that be should just say fuck em', work with the Tuareg, clear it out, and let there be a non-Islamist Azawad.

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